As with the recent Dutch probe into the downing of a Malaysian jet over Ukraine, investigators may reconstruct the recovered debris on a specially constructed frame.

That can help pinpoint an explosion’s source by examining the impact of shockwaves and debris on the fuselage. Engines may be examined for shrapnel and even paint smears if a suspected blast is thought to have happened near the front of the plane.

Doubts meanwhile remain over what evidence the black boxes will supply. Egyptian officials said the voice recorder was damaged and previous disasters suggest the separate flight data recorder would have seen its power cut and produced little of value.

But science may help fill in some of the blanks.

On the UTA jetliner, as well as a TWA jet whose fuel tank blew up over the Atlantic in 1996, cockpit tapes ended immediately after the blast but still yielded vital clues thanks to a procedure called “spectrum analysis”.

Scientists use such methods to examine the signature of any sounds picked up in the last microseconds of normal flight.

That helped investigators of the UTA disaster to identify a revealing sound: not of the blast itself but of the airframe transmitting shockwaves like a tuning fork.

Investigators may be able to compare any usable fragment of audio to the frequencies produced by those previous explosions to try to assess whether they are looking at evidence of a bomb.